It's beginning to feel more and more like early 1939, when Nazi Germany seemed bent on World War with the Islamic Republic of Iran standing in for that role. The Bush Administration has at last entered the countdown to conflict by putting the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons before the Security Council of the United Nations. My bet is that Iran will not wait much longer for American action, but will launch a surprise attack against the USA and/or Israel and begin the war.
Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, April 7
While Western defense establishments have had tepid responses to Iran's show of force, the regime built on its provocations Wednesday when the supreme commander of its Revolutionary Guards, Maj.-Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, issued a thinly veiled threat to close the Straits of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which 40 percent of the world's oil passes.
Iran's recent financial maneuverings also indicate general preparations for global war. The Swiss newspaper Der Bund reported the Iranian regime recently withdrew $31 billion of its gold reserves and foreign exchange from European financial institutions. Additionally, this week Iran renewed its gasoline rationing for the general public.
While President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's poisonous and apocalyptic rhetoric has caused the Western world to step away from him, Teheran is far from isolated. To the contrary, today it perceives itself and is perceived by others as the leader of a regional Islamist axis.
In February Canada's Globe and Mail published a report in which Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hizbullah member of the Lebanese parliament, declared that on January 20 the Islamist axis was formally cemented in Damascus. The parley which brought about the entente was led by Ahmadinejad and attended by axis members Syrian President Bashar Assad, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal, Islamic Jihad chief Ramadan Abdullah Shalah and the commanders of PLO breakaway front groups. Iraqi Shiite terror chief Muqtada al-Sadr also pledged his allegiance to the axis….
[M]embers of the Islamic axis believe that they are on the march and that America and Israel are on the retreat.
This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces now control Hizbullah's posts along the border with northern Israel and are developing an advanced intelligence gathering network for spying on Israel. As senior IDF commander told the paper that Hizbullah posts built and fortified by the Iranians just meters away from the international border are "now Iran's frontline with Israel. The Iranians are using Hizbullah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it."…
All of these recent developments demonstrate that the members of the Iran-led Islamist axis are actively pursuing and indeed progressing in their quest to encircle Israel and entrap the US.
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